If you don't mind elaborating more, and/or opening tickets, I'm sure there are plenty of folks who'd be glad to help with the pain points.

Pagination shouldn't be too big of a deal -- that's precisely the sort of thing that Collections can make easy ... ditto for modeling a sparse array (although I'm fuzzy on why you'd need that -- if it's for performance only, you should be using something more low level)...

As for boilerplate, I'm not sure what Backbone-forms has to do with it -- if you're suggesting that Backbone should include UI widgets for auto-generating forms ... I think that's very far away from the role that Backbone is supposed to serve.

To clarify: backbone is so great and widely adopted because it is almost perfectly agnostic and easy to plug into other libraries. But, it feels like Connect, not Express. There's still boilerplate in my code to crush.

I don't like feature request issues, once we are done with the current project we'll send a couple of pull requests.